US War on Iran: Inventing an Iranian ThreatTuesday, August 28 @ 07:45:32 UTC

By Stephen Lendman
August 27, 2012

Iran threatens no one. Western and Israeli leaders know it. So do over 100 Non-Aligned Movement countries coming to Tehran. They'll be there from August 26 - 31. They'll participate in NAM's 16th summit.

Their presence endorses Iran's legitimacy, extends support, shows disapproval of Western hostility and belligerence, and confers prestige when Tehran most needs it.

Washington and Israel target the Islamic Republic relentlessly. Longstanding war plans await implementation. Media scoundrels and right-wing think tanks support it. They're paid to endorse ravaging one country after another.

US War on Iran: U.S. and Israel more of an existential threat to IranWednesday, May 02 @ 14:33:10 UTC

By Sherwood Ross
May 02, 2012

Just looking at the facts, it appears far more likely that the U.S. will attack Iran again than Iran would attack the U.S. or Israel, America’s Middle East pawn. I say “again” because the U.S. has already an embarrassing record of aggression against Iran, so, if past is prologue, the U.S./Israeli alliance will strike Iran, not the other way around. A review of the historical record and contemporary military outlays and actions tends to support this view. In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossedagh, a crime for which the U.S. has never apologized. The overthrow put Mohammad-Reza Shah(king) Palevi on the throne, a man whose dictatorship savagely tortured and killed thousands of Iranians over 26 years.

President Obama has informed the Iranians they have one “last chance” to avoid attack. They must suspend higher uranium enrichment, close down the Fordow enrichment facility, and “surrender” their stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 per cent purity. Iranian officials respond matter-of-factly that such demands are “irrational.” (Some Israeli officials, eager to build the case for attack, are reportedly delighted with the Iranian response.)

Seasoned U.S. analysts seem to agree with the Iranian assessment.Stephen M Walt writes in Foreign Policy, “For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the Obama administration is thinking about Iran... I’m puzzled.” Gary Sick, writing for CNN, predicts dire consequences of an attack on Iran and seems to question its wisdom. So why is Obama being so confrontational? So irrational?

“The devils in Washington do go crazy whenever their will is thwarted.”

It is a good thing for people all over the world that Iran feels confident enough to threaten resistance to United States aggression. In the uni-polar world, that is to say one controlled by American interests, the only salvation for humanity is the ability and willingness of nations to push back against imperialism’s dictates.

The signs that Iran will be a new target for the U.S. are ominous and unmistakable. The propaganda campaign against it is growing, with constant and false claims that Iran is a danger to the world and on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.

“It was just another example of a plan which would not have existed had it not been instigated by an informant.”

While the nation's attention has been focused on the Occupy Wall Street movement, new dangers for this country and for the world have been created by the Obama administration. The president has made it clear that America's interventionist path has not changed direction one bit. If anything, he has done what once would have seemed impossible, accelerating that direction more than his predecessor ever hoped.

In a period of just five months, Barack Obama has assassinated Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki without charge or trial. He attempted to kill Libyan president Moammar Gaddafi the same weekend of the bin Laden assassination. Ronald Reagan also tried to kill Gaddafi, but gave up after one attempt and decided not to spend any effort on regime change in Libya. Obama has out Reaganed Reagan by overthrowing Gaddafi and, along with his NATO partners, waging a war against a civilian population to place a puppet government in charge in Tripoli. Once again he has succeeded in making right wing dreams come true in ways that Republicans did not dare.

US War on Iran: U.S. Throws All the Demons in the Mix for the Mother Of All Anti-Iran Psy-OpsThursday, October 13 @ 08:43:38 UTC

By Glen Ford
October 13, 2011

“The whole thing smells more like the FBI’s schemes to frame Black men in Miami and Newburgh, New York, for terroristic attacks that never did, or could, happen.”

Who said Barack Obama would bring sobriety and dignity to U.S. foreign policy? The president’s men, and Top Woman Hillary Clinton, have thrown every stereotypical demon of middle American nightmares into the psychological operations gumbo, to create a war hysteria against Iran. No reflexive terror button is left unpushed, no racial hysteria unexploited. Bubble, bubble, boil and trouble, the administration is cooking up an almost comically infernal witches brew just in time for Halloween.

According to the August 19th edition of The New York Times (“U.S. assures Israel that Iran threat is not imminent”), “American and Israeli officials believe breakout” – that is, a transition from enriching uranium for civilian use to developing a workable nuclear weapon – “is unlikely anytime soon.”

US War on Iran: Who pays for the loss of life in Iran?Monday, September 06 @ 22:30:45 UTC

By Kourosh Ziabari
September 6, 2010

Since the victory of Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 which toppled the U.S.-backed regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran has been facing with devastating and agonizing financial sanctions of the United States and its European allies who didn't favor the post-revolutionary Iran's doctrine of confrontation with the superpowers and its denial of Western liberal democratic values.

The 1979 revolution which put an end to 2,500 years of imperial monarchy in Iran was pivoted on theocratic and ideological values which the sumptuous, thrilling West usually tends to dislike and rebuff. Under the spiritual leadership of Imam Khomeini, Iranians declared that they wouldn't need the support of Western and Eastern superpowers, will stand on their own feet and only seek to realize a political regime which establishes its bases and principles in accordance with morality and Islamic solidarity.

US War on Iran: Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan: Diplomacy of BrotherhoodMonday, August 16 @ 17:58:28 UTC

By Kourosh Ziabari
August 15, 2010

The trilateral summit of the presidents of three Persian-speaking countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan wrapped up on August 5 in Tehran and recorded another unforgettable event in the memory of the three brother nations. With innumerable cultural, religious, social, lingual and strategic commonalities, the three countries of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan have demonstrated their potentiality to build one of the strongest diplomatic partnerships in the region and benefit the world nations through a unique, fruitful and constructive cooperation.

The people of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, whose countries were parts of the Greater Persia in ancient times, consider Iran as their cultural homeland and believe that the Iranian nation is the inheritor of their paternal legacy, the Persian civilization.

If and when the United States and Israel bomb Iran (marking the sixth country so blessed by Barack Obama) and this sad old world has a new daily horror show to look at on their TV sets, and we then discover that Iran was not actually building nuclear weapons after all, the American mainstream media and the benighted American mind will ask: "Why didn't they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?"

The same questions were asked about Iraq following the discovery that Saddam Hussein didn't in fact have any weapons of mass destruction. However, in actuality, before the US invasion Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. I'm reminded of this by the recent news report about Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq. Last week he told the British inquiry into the March 2003 invasion that those who were "100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out to have "less than zero percent knowledge" of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction. 1

US War on Iran: Iran's nuclear standoff: who is the loser?Tuesday, July 27 @ 04:32:05 UTC

By Kourosh Ziabari
July 25, 2010

It's more than 8 years that the world's newspapers are filled with miscellaneous news, reports and commentaries concerning Iran's nuclear program. Controversy over Iran's nuclear program has spanned through two administrations in Iran: ex-President Mohammad Khatami's government and the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration. The term "Iran nuclear program" returns more than 6 million results in Google web search. Thousands of scholars, journalists, politicians and political pundits have made their own statement regarding this debatable subject.

Terminologically, Iran's nuclear program calls to mind the words holocaust, Israel, Zionism, Axis of Evil, George W. Bush, stretched hands and uranium enrichment. The world is watching the uninteresting continuation of confrontation over Iran's nuclear program and the opportunist journalists find this tedious charade the best subject to entertain their readers and enrich their portfolio.

An article in the current issue of the AARP Bulletin is likely to get a “What’s this?” reaction from many of its millions of readers. It is titled “Iranian Cure for the Delta’s Blues,” with the eye-opening subtitles: “Mississippi Looks to Iran’s health care system”” “That model has improved health dramatically”; “Will it travel well to Baptist Town?”

The media has painted Iran as a backward third world country of 72 million people, who have little to teach us. Presidents Bush and Obama further a narrow view of Iran by looking at it through a military lens. Iranians do suffer from a lack of freedom of expression and widespread human rights abuses.

US War on Iran: Chomsky: What's At Stake in the Issue of IranFriday, April 30 @ 14:56:06 UTC

By Noam Chomsky
April 30, 2010

In an interview with the German publication, Freitag, Noam Chomsky talks about U.S. pressure on Israel and Iran and its geopolitical significance. "Iran is perceived as a threat because they did not obey the orders of the United States. Militarily this threat is irrelevant. This country has not behaved aggressively beyond its borders for centuries. Israel invaded Lebanon with the blessing and help of the U.S. five times in thirty years. Iran has not done anything like this," he says.´

Barak Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 while sending more troops to Afghanistan. What happened to the "change" that was promised?

While Washington’s Iran policy is often described as oriented toward containment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the aims are much broader, and the assumption that Iran has nuclear weapons ambitions is without foundation. US policy is directed at eclipsing the rise of Iran as an independent economic, military and political power, and seeks as an ultimate objective the subordination of Iran to Washington, economically, militarily and politically. Washington’s short-term goal is to prevent Tehran from developing an independent nuclear power industry that is sufficiently advanced to establish a breakout capability — the potential to rapidly manufacture nuclear arms in response to a crisis. An Iran able to rapidly add a nuclear deterrent to its defensive capabilities threatens Washington’s containment policy by taking away the option of low US and ally casualty level military aggression. Since the Vietnam War the United States has avoided engagements or combat modes that would imperil the lives of large numbers of US soldiers. A war waged against a non-nuclear Iran could be long and drawn out, but is unlikely to produce US casualties of such magnitude as to touch off major resistance within the United States. A war waged against a nuclear-armed Iran, however, would be an altogether more dangerous affair.